The Sultan's Elephant parades outside Horseguards, London. Photograph: Felipe Trueba/PA
So The Sultan's Elephant has come and gone. And, without wishing to seem misanthropic, I am tempted to say good riddance, writes Michael Billington.
It doubtless made many people harmlessly happy. But its touted carnivalesque qualities were not apparent to anyone trying to get around Oxford Circus on a baking summer morning. More importantly, I question whether this kind of diversionary spectacle can really be classified as "theatre".
Theatre, to me, is a public event that affects the mind and heart as well as the eyes, and which does something to change the human situation. The passage of a giant elephant through the streets of London - a kind of Gallic Trojan Horse - does none of those things.
What it does do is appeal to the mood of infantilism that seems to be taking over a lot of entertainment: we seem to have an unstoppable urge to become little children - gazing with open mouths, dilated pupils and dropping jaws at whatever is put in front of us.
Whatever happened to adult scepticism and rationality? For me The Sultan's Elephant is simply a spectacular irrelevance to the real business of theatre.
But, then, there is nothing new in the English appetite for freakish sideshows. Remember how Trinculo in The Tempest, encountering what looks like a monstrous man-fish, thinks how it could be profitably exhibited back home? "There," he says, "would this monster make a man. Any strange beast there makes a man. When they will not give a doit to relieve a lame beggar, they will lay out ten to see a dead Indian." Clearly nothing changes.
The Sultan's Elephant was a momentary distraction: good summer copy and a bizarre eruption onto our crowded streets - but nothing, in the end, to do with theatre.
